People bought ‘fake heiress’ slogan T-shirts, Elle Magazine published an Anna Delvey inspired eyeliner tutorial, titled ‘ How to get a summer scammer look, without actually scamming anyone’, and media organisations fell over themselves to consider the deeper meanings of so-called ‘grifter season’. Suffice it to say, within a few weeks of Pressler’s story breaking, the broke ‘heiress’ was big business. This perfect storm of contemporary personalities is why I’m not going to explain any further who Anna Delvey is, because, frankly if you don’t already know you must have been living under the proverbial rock for the last three years (lucky you, to be honest). And, right at the heart of ‘the Anna Delvey story,’ was the art foundation-slash-social club that she dreamed of establishing, which sounded a bit like Soho House, if it had a German bakery and installations from Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons (Christo would be on hand to ‘wrap’ the building on the opening day, Delvey promised). There were dinners with Macaulay Culkin, and dinners with ‘pharma-bro’ Martin Shkreli, who allegedly played leaked tracks from Lil Wayne’s delayed album, Tha Carter V, at the restaurant, and who would later be convicted of securities fraud (only after raising the price of life-saving drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a pill). There was the ‘futurist’ boyfriend ‘on the TED-Talks circuit’ who had ‘been profiled in the New Yorker.’ There was the ‘personal trainer-slash-life coach’ who worked with Dakota Johnson and whose package of sessions cost $4,500. But, behind Anna’s ‘heart-shaped face and pouty lips’ was a treasure trove of details seemingly designed to break the internet. On the surface it may seem strange that a story about one wannabe socialite could go so stratospheric (in New York, of all places, the city of wannabes). Industry tracker Chartbeat recorded it as the sixth most-read story of that year. By that I mean it is based on a New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler, ‘ How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People’, which went mega-viral in early 2018. Maybe it could be no other way, seeing as the series’ starting point was pure SEO fodder to begin with. This is “the Anna Delvey story,” as everyone keeps saying, over and over, like the script was written by automated SEO software. Despite attempts to construct itself as an ensemble piece – the series follows journalist Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky) in her investigation into Delvey (Julia Garner) and each episode trails the perspective of a different Delvey acquaintance, or witness, if you will – really Inventing Anna is a one-woman show. Don’t expect an interrogation of US incarceration, or a deep-dive into the notoriously hellish conditions at New York’s mammoth jail complex, because Inventing Anna only has time for one entity renowned for exploitation and misconduct, and that’s Delvey herself. So to Rikers Island, where we lay our scene, and where, in spring 2018, Ms ‘Delvey’ – real name Sorokin – was jailed without bail while awaiting trial for grand larceny. Shonda Rhimes, Inventing Anna, 2022, still. Because the unglossed truth is that, no matter how hard you try to evade them, things have a habit of catching up with you in the end. And, while Spodek might be right that everyone lies, there’s a reason the phrase ‘nothing is certain except death and taxes’ has entered common parlance. Not everyone forges documents in an attempt to defraud international banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But, what he’s not saying – what he’s trying to gloss over – is that not everyone lies about being an heiress to a fortune in the multi-millions, and not everyone tries to skip out on hotel bills totalling tens of thousands of dollars. Who isn’t guilty, is what he’s really saying. This, essentially, is how criminal attorney Todd Spodek frames his defending argument for his star client in Shonda Rhimes’s new Netflix series Inventing Anna (2022). Everyone presents an image of themselves to the world, and, at times, this may only have a tenuous relationship to reality. Whether it’s touching up a CV or a selfie, everyone puts a spin on things, a certain gloss. Shonda Rhimes’s Netflix series about New York’s fake heiress can’t fight its adoration of fake-it-till-you-make-it capitalismĮveryone lies.
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